“Pa, we can talk later,” I told him. “We’ve got to go.”

I hauled him into a freight car, just glad the train had stopped. He was still too wobbly to have jumped.

I didn’t even check to see which direction we were heading in till we were under way. The sun was rising behind us. We were going west.

Pa slept the morning off, while I tried to figure what we were going to do next. Not coming up with any bright answer, I finally gave up trying and contented myself with sitting in the boxcar doorway. The scenery wasn’t all that different from the Dakotas. More crops to cattle, maybe, but mainly I saw worn-out land and signs everywhere of people struggling to make a living on it. Or the leavings where folks had given up trying.

I watched a man walking behind a mule team, plowing up crop stubble. Dust blew up around them.

“Fool!” Pa said, startling me. I hadn’t heard him come over. “Somebody ought to tell him farming’s for fools.”

“You didn’t used to think so,” I said. “We had a good place.”

“Had. Had!”

“Couldn’t you have done anything to keep it?” I asked. It was a question I’d never stopped wondering about.

“What?” Pa sounded defensive. “The one bank took my savings. The other waited for my cotton crop to fail and me to not pay my mortgage. They knew it was bound to happen, sometime.”

He said, “Cotton’s like that. Boll weevils one year. Not enough water the next. And the soil getting poorer all the time.”

“So why didn’t you try growing something different?”

“Because I was a cotton farmer! Why do you think? Like my pa and his. Our place always grew cotton.”

I could see he wanted me to understand, but those weren’t reasons!

“Maybe—” I broke off. I didn’t have any maybe to offer. “Pa . . .”

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a whisky bottle. “Here.”

“No,” I said.

The railroad bulls got us early that afternoon, at a water-stop town at the far edge of another dust storm. Likely it was the dirty haze hanging in the air that kept us from spotting the guards until they and their German shepherds were almost on us.

Maybe the hard-to-breathe filth was what made them ornery enough to haul us into jail, too, instead of just chasing us out of the boxcar with warnings and a few whacks of their batons.

Getting beaten would have shamed me, but nothing like being arrested did.

By the time Pa and I were in handcuffs, my heart was pounding hard enough to burst clear out of my chest. It didn’t slow when we got taken to a little jailhouse, along with a couple of other hobos. We were booked for trespassing on railroad property and theft of transportation.